


sticks and stones

by irnan



Category: Batman and Robin (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-19
Updated: 2013-07-19
Packaged: 2017-12-20 16:56:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/889651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick's never really tackled the question head-on before, but Damian, unlike certain others Dick could name, seems to be happy to listen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sticks and stones

**Author's Note:**

> oh god I’m so nervous about this thing, you have no idea. it’s about Dick and Damian and languages and ethnicities and heritage and I’m white and european and probably shouldn’t be talking about this, so. Someone tell me if I’m Doing It Wrong, please. Please.

Dick has not really considered himself Rom in – in some ways, not ever, if he’s honest. It’s – it’s complicated, OK, and not like his father made that many overt efforts to include Dick in that world and that life. Sometimes he wonders if something had ever – happened. Or been said. (He thinks his maternal grandparents live(d?) in Maine. One day he might get up the courage to go find out.) Though yes, he speaks Romani, Welsh Romani in fact – or he did, once.

A long time ago.

You unlearn languages so quickly when you’re a kid.

Especially ones that no one else around you understands, and that aren’t written languages, and that most of the people you now have to interact with consider a marker of –

Anyway.

Babs said once she thought that was a shame. Does it feel like he’s lost something?

Actually, love, yes. It feels like he lost his whole family. He doesn’t say so, mind you. He shrugs it off like he’s always shrugged it off, and it’s strange that Babs who knows him so well in so many ways accepts his flippancy in this, takes him at face value. (Lots of people do, but then, he has a very pretty face; everyone says so.) Barbara has since decided – she’ll happily do to others what she’d kill you for doing to her; he’s always known that – that he deliberately threw it away, and then proceeded to decree that this was a Bad Decision on Dick’s part. She still snarks at him about it when they’ve got nothing better to bicker about.

Dick thinks it was never really his to keep in the first place. It’s perhaps a little melodramatic to think that none of the things he loves ever were.

_Perhaps melodramatic_ , good God, he’s been moping all morning, what the actual hell. Thinking about his father and his heritage does that to him sometimes; Dick is only too well aware that he doesn’t necessarily look Rom, and – and oh, the _hell_ with it. Dick shakes himself, hard.

Used to be that the Titans would catch him when he sunk into stupid moods like this. Since Dick came back to Gotham to stay he’s taught himself to catch himself – it’s one of a number of mental defence mechanisms he likes to cultivate in order to ensure he never wakes up one morning transformed in his bed into a giant bat.

Roy, were he here, would probably suggest that it’s too late for that. Dick suddenly wants, quite badly, to actually hear him say it. He’ll make a phone call later on. Maybe more than one… yes, definitely. How many guest rooms does this penthouse have? And, let’s face it, he’d sort of love to watch Lian and the West twins tackle Damian…

Damian. He’d resolved, yesterday, not to say anything, decided that was easier, safer, but –

Dick levers his body out of the armchair he’s been sunk in – Jesus, the only thing missing was a brandy glass. It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning. Damian’s in the kitchen with his headphones in; Dick catches the faint beat of the music he’s listening to. He pours himself another coffee; stands, leaning against the counter, and watches his little brother fiddle with his ipod one-handed. The other is rooting around in the fruit bowl, searching under a pile of oranges for the last apple.

Dick says, “Damian.”

Damian flicks his eyes at him. “Grayson?”

Dick makes a _take your headphones out_ gesture. Damian glares, but complies.

“Grayson. Was there something?”

“Actually, yes,” says Dick. “Remember the girl in the park last night?”

Damian frowns. “The gypsy. Of course I remember.”

There it is.

“Please don’t use that word again.”

“What?”

“That word,” Dick repeats, endlessly patient. Well, he’s had to be, hasn’t he, what with first one Wayne and now the other. “The racial slur? Please don’t use it again.”

Arrogant, impulsive, more violent than Dick would like and in many ways inexperienced, though in others far too old for his years: these are all things Damian most certainly is.

Stupid he is not.

He pauses, considers; dismisses Dick with a flick of his fingers and a shrug. “If you insist.”

He doesn’t meet Dick’s eyes; Dick has learned to interpret this as embarrassment.

“On the whole, I think I do,” he says, tone more rueful than his words would suggest.

“Of course,” says Damian. That’s… actually, that’s quite the concession. There is the faintest suggestion of red across his cheekbones.

Dick drinks his coffee, smiles at his little brother, says, “What are you listening to, anyway?”

They get into an argument about the merits of Charlie Parker that lasts about half an hour longer than it should.

That ought to have been the end of it, but Dick can’t stop turning the conversation over and over in his mind, examining it from all angles. It felt good to say it. To – to _claim_ his heritage, he supposes, in a way he hasn’t done in a long while. He's not a part of the community, but it is a part of his past, and of his family's past. He doesn’t remember when he told Babs about it. He’s pretty sure he’s never mentioned it to Tim. Most of the time, people don’t even realise. 

He thinks about Damian’s embarrassment, and the boy’s easy acquiescence to Dick’s rebuke, and the way his British accent is getting sharper, crisper; only a few months ago it was softened by a Middle Eastern pronunciation that followed his mother’s and grandfather’s.

Finally, a couple days after That Conversation, Dick corners Damian in the kitchen again and tries to get Damian to correct his Arabic pronunciation, swearing he’s only brushing up on it so he can read _Arabian Nights_ in the original.

“Preferably with the dirty bits left in,” he says, grinning. It throws him off sometimes that Damian so rarely finds that kind of joke entertaining; when Dick himself was eleven and hanging off tree branches in the grounds of the Manor with Roy, even mildly filthy jokes made him turn red and giggle for minutes on end.

“Why would you even assume I speak Arabic?” says Damian, exasperated. “It could be Persian. Or Turkish. Or Bedouin, or –“

“I didn’t know Bedouin was a separate dialect,” says Dick interestedly.

“- or any other one of dozens of dialects of the existence of which you indubitably have no knowledge whatsoever,” finishes Damian. “I might be Jewish for all you know, Grayson. Or –” he waves his hands.

“Zoroastrian,” says Dick. “Is that a separate dialect as well?”

Damian shrugs. “Zoroastrian liturgical language is Avestan, which is otherwise extinct,” he says. “Macedonian. The ancient Greek kind, _if_ you please.”

“Assyrian, oh great Alexander.”

“Phoenician.”

“Philistine.” Dick grins.

Damian glares. “Aramaic.”

“Uh,” says Dick, groping now. “Coptic?” Does Damian like history? Maybe Dick should be brushing up on that. He’d enjoy that. Working at the Cloisters was fun, but he didn’t read much history that wasn’t European.

“Hittite,” says Damian. His mouth isn’t smiling, but his eyes are. “The Copts are Egyptian Christians.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re an atheist,” says Dick, deliberately obtuse.

“Not the point,” says Damian, swinging back to being puzzled by Dick developing a previously-unknown enthusiasm for Central Semitic languages.

“No,” Dick agrees. He thinks of his father, of half-remembered traditions and broken bits and pieces of a language. Then he thinks of Yoska, ashamed to realise that he hasn’t done so in some time. “It would be a shame if you ever lost it, Damian – whichever language it is.”

Damian falls silent, perhaps too puzzled to answer. Dick remembers the initial sick shame of realising he’d forgotten, the taste of horror in wondering how the hell he’d managed to _lose_ a language he’d spoken – perhaps never as fluently as he could have, but often enough – throughout the early years of his childhood.

They finish their meal. Dick’s got a file or dozen to read up on for the WE board meeting tomorrow; Tim does so like to give him homework. Damian has schoolwork of his own. Dick’s fairly confident that he’ll finally consent to enrol in Gotham Academy by the start of next term, if only so he can get out of the house more often. Plus he’ll probably enjoy getting to lord it over the other kids with how smart he is.

Maybe they’ll stick with the homeschooling thing for a _bit_ longer.

They’ve sat in busy silence for nearly an hour and a half when Damian says suddenly, “Do you speak Romani? It could be – useful. In the field. As a code.”

And, Dick thinks, the best part is that Babs can’t even tease him. _That could be useful_ is the excuse she uses to justify her own fits of self-indulgence.

Later that day, he goes to phone Roy.


End file.
